A Spider In The Eye

by Mark Hayes

  I had been sent to India for a reason, after all. Not that The Ministry deemed it wise to explain a damn thing to me. But I was placed on the Jonah’s Lament for a reason as well. The Ministry had manipulated things to get me a berth on that particular ship. Then of all the ships to get half-inched by bandits, it’s the Jonah that gets hijacked. I may be a little slow at times, but that seemed too much of a coincidence to me. The Ministry must have known it to be a likely target at the very least. Or they had set her up, a lost flight plan here, rumours of goods it was carrying, whatever. I knew full well there were people who bought such information, as there were people who sell it. It is no great leap to guess The Ministry’s hand at play. It was a set up plain and simple, feed the pirates the right information and Roberta’s your father’s cross-dressing brother.

  So the pirates, bandits or whoever they were take the ship and take me prisoner into the bargain. Which led to another set of questions entirely, the same question I kept on asking myself.

  Why me?

  Why did The Ministry think they would take me prisoner, and not just lump me over the side or run me through.

  I still wasn’t sure I would like the answer to that particular question. If I ever found out, and even that wasn’t the end of it. Because of all people, look who turns up with the pirates. The ever lovely Miss Saffron Wells, whose great-grandfather was the whole reason I had been sent to sodding India to start with. A fellow mole of The Ministry’s, or stalking horse, or whatever they thought she was. Though I wasn’t sure that was the case anymore. If the monocular thing I was wearing, we were both wearing, was any clue at all, she had managed to escape their tender charms in some way and had found a solution to the whole spider in the eye problem.

  Yet even that wasn’t straightforward, was it? I mean, well, my guess was that The Ministry knew that this ship was the right kind of target because they probably knew about Captain Jackson’s sidelines and when the ship would be vulnerable, setting him up and me at the same time. But the only way they could know what kind of targets were likely to be the right kind of target would be to get that information from someone who knew. Someone they have some element of control over, who also had connections to the pirates. Someone very like Miss Wells.

  Which begged the question of why Saffron would go through with it when she found a way around the whole Arachno-Oculus problem? If you’re no longer playing the bait, why go through with the trap. Unless she was playing a longer game than I suspected? A worrying thought I’m sure you’ll agree.

  But the possible duplicitousness of Miss Saffron Wells aside, it was no great leap of logic to suspect I had now found myself landed in the clutches of her great-grandfather H.G. Another worrying thought. Not least because if Saffron was now batting for the other side, she’d likely throw me to the wolves in a heartbeat. She knew why I was in India after all. So when I heard the clang of boots on deck plates in the corridor outside a while later, I was certain that I was about to come face to face with H.G. Wells esquire. A meeting I had every reason to suspect would not go well for me.

  CHAPTER THE TWENTIETH

  At Least It Wasn’t Bloody Snowing…

  The door of my tiny cabin opened, and as it did so, I took a step back. Which given how small the cabin was put me up against the wall. I suddenly felt very hemmed in, and found myself crouching slightly. My hand must have nervously been hovering towards the top of my boot and my trusty cutthroat, just on the off chance I would pluck up the courage to actually grab it.

  My heart was racing by this time. I had passed the last hour or so worrying about all the whys, and the whos, and the ‘what the hells’. I’d gotten myself a little tightly wound if I’m honest. After all this I was finally going to get some answers. I was still not sure how much I wanted to know what they were.

  In the doorway stood something utterly unexpected. Well, not that unexpected, it was a man after all. Unexpected would have been something else entirely. But all the same, it was a man dressed as a Buddhist monk, which was not what I expected.

  When I say dressed as a Buddhist monk I mean the whole works. The orange robe, shaved head, prayer beads, wooden sandals, the whole shebang. Which threw me off my stride somewhat. He didn’t look quite right though, and it took me a moment to realise what was wrong about him. But when I did see it, it became obvious. The man in front of me. He wasn’t Nepalese, or Chinese, Vietnamese or any other ‘ese’, he was in short no one you would expect to find in a Buddhist robe, because he was in fact European.

  Northern European at that, for all his skin had the tan of a man who had spent some years away in sunnier climes. He also had little horn-rim glasses and a bushy moustache. A civil servant, bank manager of a moustache. Which was quite a surprise on a Buddhist monk, as I’m sure you can appreciate. That should have been a clue, but I was still been slow on the uptake. So it took me a moment or two to recognise him.

  In my defence, the picture I had seen him in before had been a faded old thing, not quite in focus as a lot of old photos aren’t. But it was still him, the man in M’s picture. Shaved head and mantra chanting robes aside it was him. Mr H.G. Wells Esq. Formally of some Church of England parish in the Cotswolds. Now as far from a man of the Church of England as you could get.

  The blighter had apparently gone native.

  “Mr Hannibal Smyth, I presume?” H.G. Wells said with a certain calm self-assuredness in his voice. He was a picture of calm right then. This, The Ministry’s most wanted man in Queen ‘Face Like A Slapped Arse When She’s In A Good Mood’s’ Empire. Calm as you like, far calmer than I felt at any rate. And, he said my name in an ‘I know all about you’ kind of way, if you get my drift. This, all things considered, did little for my confidence in the possibility of a prolonged existence.

  The thing is I know all about myself. In his position I’d have killed me on the spot. Occasionally, in my wistful moments, I thank God almighty that I’ve never been captured by myself.

  I tried to force myself to relax, and straightened myself up. Even if that meant my hand was so much further away from the cutthroat in my boot.

  Trying to hide my racing panic-stricken mind, I coughed loudly, as if clearing my throat, while wondering if I should offer him my hand. Whatever else he was, he was still British after all. There are, after all, certain forms to be maintained when two Englishmen meet abroad.

  I coughed once more for good measure before I replied, still trying to gather my wits.

  “And you would be Mr Horace George Wells, I suspect,” I said, trying not to be outdone on the ‘I know who you are’ stakes. I suspect, however, I didn’t sound as calm as he had or I wished to. Something else was still bugging me though I was a little too strung out to know what.

  “You suspect correctly. Now Mr Smyth, I am afraid I have to ask you, have you been sent to kill me by my old friends at The Ministry?” he asked, his voice betraying nothing at all. It was still just as calm and level. I’ll say this much, whatever mantras he was saying for inner peace they seemed to be working. He was utterly unruffled by the idea that I might be an assassin aimed at him by a shadowy branch of the British government.

  He was a damn sight more unruffled than me that was for sure. But not to be outdone I was determined to brazen it out if nothing else.

  “I have no idea,” I replied after a moment, which was the absolute truth. “My brief was just to find you and infiltrate your… whatever you have here,” I added, deciding in an instant to stick with the whole truth-telling plan, which did not come naturally to me, truth be… well, you know what I mean.

  I was still feeling that itch that something or other that wasn’t quite right as well. Something important I was still missing while I discussed the possibility with this middle-aged, middle-class Englishman, come Buddhist monk that I had been sent to kill him. It was nibbling at my paranoia.

  “Hum, yes I am sure. Big Mac predicted as much I am told. The Ministry does like its secrets. Even when they are keeping them from
their own cat’s paw. Still, you’re here now. I suppose I could even congratulate you on your success. Finding me was, after all, your mission. But it does rather beg the question does it not, what am I to do with you?” he asked.

  I found myself wondering who in God’s name Big Mac was. All I needed on top of everything else was some Jacobite mystic to deal with as well. But that was a question that would have to wait a while. And I was none the wiser when I found out. Bloody thing that it is, it remains a mystery to me how all the cogs and gears on it manage to come out with answers to questions because you feed the right piece of cardboard into it. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves talking about Mr S Jobs’s contraptions.

  I put it out of my mind and carried on with the bravado and brazen plan of action. What was he to do with me indeed?

  “You could… I don’t know, let me go, drop me off in Shanghai or somewhere else out of the way. I’m no fonder of The Ministry than you are. I’d be quite happy to just disappear, as it were,” I replied after pretending to give it some thought.

  Some hope of that, but it was worth a try. It wasn’t like I’d many options before me. I probably sounded more puzzled than bullish anyway, because try as I might, that itch at the back of my mind was not going away.

  Wells laughed. On the whole, it was a more pleasant laugh that I would have gotten out of M I am sure, but still I wasn’t sure I liked that laugh, and what it might mean for me.

  “I think not, Mr Smyth, I think not,” he said, turning his back to me, quite unthreatened by the possibility I might attempt to do him harm when he did so. Then he just walked away past the two burly guards he had brought with him. I forgot to mention them, I know, but did you really think he was alone? They were big men, thuggie cultist kind of big.

  Remember them, the head squeezers? I did. So as they stepped in and took hold of me, I came to the swift conclusion I was going to let them escort me out of the ship. I wasn’t going to make any trouble, and I was going to hope that while I wasn’t getting dropped off in Shanghai any time soon, I was probably not going to get killed right there and then. At least I bloody hoped not…

  It was while they were, without too much in the way of nastiness, marching me through the bowels of the Jonah’s Lament that what had been bugging me about Wells struck home.

  It wasn’t that I recognised him from his photograph, or even that he looked like his photograph. It was that he looked just like it, in fact. I would venture he didn’t look a day older than he had in that picture. Oh shaven head, orange robes, a decent tan, yes. But not a day older.

  And that photograph had been taken over a hundred years ago.

  The guards gently marched me out of the ship, across a boarding ramp and into the icy cold mountain mists. Snowflakes were falling in the gloom like they were forming in the very cloud that hung around me. They marched me a good hundred yards or so across barren ground. Then shoved rather than threw me into a cell.

  The cell was one of a type achingly familiar to me. Oh, the steel bars were a bit rustier and the stone walls were of a rougher hew. But it was still exactly the type of cell I should have expected. I could tell this because of the view through the shroud of the mist beyond the bars.

  An upright frame, a heavy cross beam, and a loop of rope dangling down. I recognised it straight away. I mean, what else could it be? Standing there, a short final walk away. A mist-wrapped gallows across the yard. All but calling me to my fate.

  I had travelled across half the world, been beat up, knocked out, tied up, assaulted by mad Americans with brass arms, gassed, threatened, poisoned (though admittedly that had been by myself with the rhaki). I’d had insidious mechanical spiders inserted in my eye and become the cat’s paw of powerful bastards who don’t even bother to tell you what you’re doing in the first place and at the end of all that I’d ended up in another death cell staring at a gallows.

  And why? All because of some mad bastard who was walking around in an orange dressing gown who was just as bloody mysterious as my damn employers. And just to top it off, the mad bastard in the orange dressing gown playing at being a Buddhist monk was running around with airship pirates and upsetting the apple cart.

  A mad bugger called Horace George Wells who just to cap it off wasn’t ageing. Just like Queen Iron Knickers, Brass Brassiere’d, Seldom Bloody Amused, Clockwork, Bun-Haired, Empress Of Every Pink Bit Of The Globe, Pieced German Sausage Loving. Bloody Victoria herself.

  As I sat there, while icy flakes came through the open bars of my cell, staring at that gallows across the yard, I whispered to myself.

  “Well Harry old lad, you might as well have stayed in the New Bloody Bailey. At least it wasn’t bloody snowing there…”

  CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST

  Raw Courage

  And A Cutthroat Razor

  The cells of a Nepalese mountain monastery aren’t somewhere they take you to. Rather, they’re a place they throw you, because once they put you there, then they’re finished with you.

  It’s the last stop but one. The last stop, the very last stop, is the mist-shrouded gallows across the courtyard…

  Stop me if this sounds familiar…

  Or if I just sound maudlin come to that.

  Suffice to say I wasn’t at my happiest that night. After all, they had just marched me off the Jonah’s Lament and thrown me into that cell that looked out on a gallows. Well, okay, prodded me in there, if I am being entirely accurate, but the effect was much the same.

  As the door slammed shut and the heavy bolt was locked off, I stood for a while staring out through the bars, and watched as snow fell lightly through them, into the mist which still hung heavy, staring at the shadow across the courtyard. The shadow of those gallows seemed to be beckoning me.

  Eventually, I resigned myself to a night shivering in the darkness. So I huddled under a blanket that I’d found in the back of the cell. Its three solid walls, stone floor and roof were, at least for a short time, now my home. Rusting steel bars formed the fourth wall, dear reader. Bars that ran the full length of the wall and formed the door as well. This also left it a wall open to the elements so, just to add to my bitterness before long the snow came drifting in.

  That my re-found bitterness, not that I had ever lost it, and the bitter cold of the mountains were likely to last only a short time was of little consolation. Looking out across the yard at that shadow, it would be all too damn short, for my liking.

  I must have fallen asleep despite my nerves and the buggering cold because I woke later to find someone had put a small coal brazier into my cell. It was smouldering happily and giving off enough heat so while I wasn’t actually warm, I at least wasn’t going to freeze to death.

  I huddled a little closer to it and found myself musing that if ever I wrote ‘The Good Death Cell Guide’ at some point in the future, a future I suspected I didn’t have, then this place was going to get at least one more star than the New Bailey.

  Open Sided Cells in the Hidden Valleys of Nepal

  Not entirely unpleasant place’s to spend your final hours on this earth. It may only be because they want to keep you alive long enough to hang you, but at least, they have the good grace to keep you warm.

  A reasonable five out of ten, (point added for ample fresh air)

  Highly recommended if you happen to be looking for a place Asiatic mountain regions to spend your final hours of incarceration.

  I suspect there’d never be much of a market for that particular travel pamphlet. I don’t see it replacing the good pub guide on the best sellers list. So while the thought amused me for a passing moment, it was a swiftly passing moment. Besides, I suspected right then I’d have little chance to write it anyway, though as it so happened, I was wrong about that.

  The uncomfortable night passed and the morning sun slowly burnt away the mist, and with the dawn came a lifting of my mood.

  The gallows which had so haunted me in the small hours, revealed itself to actually be a block and tackle
winch on an L frame, which hung out over a ravine. Doubtless it was used for hoisting god knows what up and down from the level plateau I’d found myself on. While I’d no doubt it could also have been used as a gallows at a pinch, it seemed to me now unlikely that was the case. As such it was just possible I’d have to drop an entry from ‘The Good Death Cell Guide’.

  My publisher doubtless would be gutted.

  As the mist lifted, the valley beyond slowly revealed itself. Not that I could see a great deal of it with my singular viewpoint. I reasoned my cell must be at the foot of the main buildings because all I could actually see was a barren valley with a few terraced fields on the mountain slopes. Presumably, those fields got more of the sun as these were on the south-western side of the mountain. Though god knew what you could grow up here in the mountains. I admit I’ve little idea when it came to agriculture. A city boy to my back teeth and I wouldn’t know a plough from a scythe in all honesty, but the gritty grey soil of the mountains seemed far from ideal for farming. Yet despite this those who knew their business better than I had a healthy crop of something growing on those slopes.

  ‘Probably beans,’ I remember thinking, for no real reason, save a personal loathing of such things that stemmed from a childhood in the East End where I was raised on sporadic vegetables and the myth of meat. Something akin to worldly knowledge only by the broadest of definitions had sunk into me long ago, so I was more or less aware that half the world lived on beans or rice, and I knew enough to know that the terraces weren’t paddy fields.

  There were, it has to be said, more interesting things to see in the valley than the bean crop. To start with, apart from the not so good ship Jonah’s Lament, there were three other airships moored in its shadow, or to be exact it was moored in theirs.

  Two of them were, or had been at least, grandiose passenger liners. Doubtless, I reasoned, they were steadily being stripped of valuables. It was the fourth airship which drew my eye, however, due to the twin headed black eagle emblem on its iron-plated flank. It was a Russian gunship, and one that was considerably larger and newer than the Jonah.